Political Economy

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© 2007 Worth Publishers Public Finance and Public Policy, 2/e, Jonathan Gruber 1 of 37

Political Economy

9.5 Conclusion

9.3 Representative Democracy

9.2 Mechanisms for

Aggregating Individual

Preferences

9.1 Unanimous Consent on

Public Goods Levels

In the case of direct democracy, voters directly cast ballots in favor of or in opposition to particular public projects.

The second case is that of representative democracy, whereby voters elect representatives, who in turn make decisions on public projects.

Government failure is the inability or unwillingness of governments to appropriately address market failures.

Chapter 9

9.4 Public Choice Theory:

The Foundations of

Government Failure

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Unanimous Consent on Public Goods Levels9 . 1

Lindahl pricing An approachto financing public goods inwhich individuals honestly revealtheir willingness to pay and thegovernment charges them thatamount to finance the publicgood.

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marginal willingness to pay The amount that individuals are willing to pay for the next unit of a good.

Lindahl Pricing

Lindahl’s procedure operates as follows:

1. The government announces a set of tax prices for the public good.

2. Each individual announces how much of the public good he or she wants at those tax prices.

3. The government repeats these steps to construct a marginal willingness to pay schedule for each individual.

4. The government adds up individual willingnesses to pay at each quantity of public good provided.

5. The government relates this overall demand curve to the marginal cost curve.

6. The government then finances this public good by charging individuals their willingnesses to pay for that quantity.

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Lindahl Pricing

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Lindahl Pricing

benefit taxation Taxation inwhich individuals are taxed for apublic good according to theirvaluation of the benefit theyreceive from that good.

The equilibrium is also the efficient level of public goods provision, the point at which the sum of the social marginal benefits of the public good is set equal to social marginal cost.

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Problems with Lindahl Pricing

The first problem is that individuals have an incentive to lie about their willingness to pay, since the amount of money they pay to finance the public good is tied to their stated willingness to pay.

Preference Revelation Problem

Preference Knowledge Problem

Even if individuals are willing to be honest about their valuation of a public good, they may have no idea of what that valuation actually is.

Preference Aggregation Problem

Even if individuals are willing to be honest and even if they know their valuation of the public good, there is a final problem: How can the government aggregate individual values into a social value?

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Mechanisms for Aggregating Individual Preferences9 . 2

A P P L I C A T I O N

Through three and a half centuries, the tradition of direct democracy, whereby individuals directly vote on the policies that affect their lives, remains strong in America—and, indeed, has grown throughout the twentieth century.

Direct Democracy in the United States

referendum A measure placed on the ballot by the government allowing citizens to vote on state laws or constitutional amendments that have already been passed by the state legislature.

voter initiative The placement of legislation on the ballot by citizens.

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Majority Voting: When It Works

majority voting The typical mechanism used to aggregate individual votes into a social decision, whereby individual policy options are put to a vote and the option that receives the majority of votes is chosen.

To be consistent, the aggregation mechanism must satisfy three goals:

Dominance.

Transitivity.

Independence of irrelevant alternatives.

Majority voting can produce a consistent aggregation of individual preferences only if preferences are restricted to take a certain form.

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There are three types of voters in a town, with equal numbers in each group:

Parents.

Elders.

Young couples without children.

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The town could proceed as follows:

First, vote on funding level H versus funding level L.

Then, vote on funding level H versus funding level M.

Then, vote on funding level L versus funding level M.

Because M has beaten both H and L, M is the overall winner. Indeed, no matter what ordering is used for these pairwise votes, M will be preferred to the other options. Majority voting has aggregated individual preferences to produce a preferred social outcome: medium school spending and taxes.

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Majority Voting: When It Doesn’t Work

cycling When majority votingdoes not deliver a consistentaggregation of individualpreferences.

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Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem There is no social decision (voting) rule that converts individual preferences into a consistent aggregate decision without either (a) restricting preferences or (b) imposing a dictatorship.

In the example with the private school parents, there is in fact no voting system that will produce a consistent outcome. Consider some alternative approaches:

We could let everyone vote on their first choice.

We could do weighted voting by assigning.

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Restricting Preferences to Solve the Impossibility Problem

single-peaked preferences Preferences with only a single local maximum, or peak, so that utility falls as choices move away in any direction from that peak.

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Median Voter Theory

Median Voter Theorem Majority voting will yield the outcome preferred by the median voter if preferences are single-peaked.

median voter The voter whose tastes are in the middle of the set of voters.

The Potential Inefficiency of the Median Voter Outcome

The median voter outcome from majority voting is very convenient. It implies that the government need find only the one voter whose preferences for the public good are right in the middle of the distribution of social preferences and implement the level of public goods preferred by that voter.

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Direct Democracy: Why Difficulties with Majority Voting Rule?

How plausible are double-peaked preferences?• It depends on the context.• Missiles: not very plausible• Public park: more plausible, a good for which there are private

substitutes.• Goods which cannot be ordered on a single dimension, like

“size.” The use of a vacant building, for example.

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Direct Democracy:Logrolling

Logrolling systems allow people to trade votes and, hence, register how strongly they feel about various issues.Vote trading is controversial, but may lead to more

efficient provision of public goods.

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Direct Democracy:Logrolling Example

Consider the benefits from three different projects for three people.

Negative values mean a net loss.

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Table 6.4

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Table 6.4 shows the net benefit for each project is positive, but under a simple majority rule scheme, none gets approved.Net benefit is negative for two of the voters in each case (but

small) and positive for one.

By trading votes, possible to get all three approved, and society gains welfare.

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Logrolling could lead to inefficient outcomes, however.Vary the benefits for all three projects, so that the net

benefit of each is now negative in Table 6.5.Here vote trading can lead to inefficient passage.

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Table 6.5

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In the second example, a majority of votes form a coalition to vote for projects that serve their interests, but whose costs are borne mainly by the minority of voters.

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Summary

Many decisions in direct democracies are made by majority voting.

If preferences are single-peaked, majority voting will consistently aggregate preferences, with the outcome chosen being that preferred by the median voter. This outcome, while convenient, may not be efficient.

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Representative Democracy

In reality, government doesn’t simply aggregate people’s preferences;

rather, the governing is done by politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and so on.

These players have their own objective functions.

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Representative Democracy:Politicians

Elected Politicians: If voters have single- peaked preferences, the vote-maximizing politician adopts the preferred program of the median voter.

See Figure 6.3.Candidates move to middle of spectrum, because

voters support candidate with view closest to own, and only one wins.

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Representative Democracy9 . 3

Vote-Maximizing Politicians Represent the Median Voter

The median voter theory in the representative democracy context rests on the single key assumption that all politicians care about is maximizing the number of votes they get.

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Assumptions of the Median Voter Model

Although the median voter model is a convenient way to describe the role of representative democracy, it does so by making a number of assumptions.

Single-dimensional Voting

The median voter model assumes that voters are basing their votes on a single issue.

In reality, representatives are elected not based on a single issue but on a bundle of issues.

Individuals may lie at different points of the voting spectrum on different issues, so appealing to one end of the spectrum or another on some issues may be vote-maximizing.

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Only Two Candidates

The median voter model assumes that there are only two candidates for office.

If there are more than two candidates, the simple predictions of the median voter model break down.

Indeed, there is no stable equilibrium in the model with three or more candidates because there is always an incentive to move in response to your opponents’ positions.

In many nations, the possibility of three or more valid candidates for office is a real one.

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No Ideology or Influence

The median voter theory assumes that politicians care only about maximizing votes.

Ideological convictions could lead politicians to position themselves away from the center of the spectrum and the median voter.

No Selective Voting

The median voter theory assumes that all people affected by public goods vote, but in fact, only a fraction of citizens vote in the United States.

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No Money

The median voter theory ignores the role of money as a tool of influence in elections.

If taking an extreme position on a given topic maximizes fundraising, even if it does not directly maximize votes on that topic, it may serve the long-run interests of overall vote maximization by allowing the candidate to advertise more strongly.

Full Information

The median voter model assumes perfect information along three dimensions: voter knowledge of the issues; politician knowledge of the issues; and politician knowledge of voter preferences.

All three of these assumptions are unrealistic.

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Lobbying

lobbying The expending of resources by certain individuals or groups in an attempt to influence a politician.

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A P P L I C A T I O N

The small sector of farmers receives $25.5 billion in direct support from the federal government each year in two forms:

Direct subsidy payments.

Price supports.

The subsidies cost each American household about $390 per year.

Why do American families pay such large costs to support the farm sector?

The typical answer provided by public policy makers of all political leanings is that this financial support is necessary to preserve the American “family farm” from larger agriculture companies and foreign competitors.

This example should not be taken to imply that large subsidies to farms is a uniquely American phenomenon. The European Union spends over $100 billion annually supporting its farmers. Japan spends over $54 billion on its farmers, with rice tariffs of nearly 500%.

Farm Policy in the United States

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Representative Democracy:Special Interests

Special interest groups can form coalitions and exercise a disproportionate amount of power if they vote in blocks or make campaign contributions.

Groups form based on many factors, including capital versus labor, rich versus poor, industries, regions, and demographics.

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Evidence on the Median Voter Model for Representative Democracy

While the median voter model is a potentially powerful tool of political economy, its premise rests on some strong assumptions that may not be valid in the real world.

A large political economy literature has tested the median voter model by assessing the role of voter preferences on legislative voting behavior relative to other factors such as party or personal ideology.

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TESTING THE MEDIAN VOTER MODEL

As noted, empirical evidence on the median voter model is mixed. Some studies find strong support for the model.

At the same time, there is also clear evidence that “core constituencies,” as opposed to just the median voter in a district, matter for legislator behavior.

Direct evidence that ideology matters was also shown in a recent paper by Washington (2004). She compares legislators who have daughters to those with the same family size who have sons. Washington’s findings strongly support the notion that personal ideology matters: politicians are responding to their own experience, not just to the demands of the voters.

E M P I R I C A L E V I D E N C E

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Public Choice Theory: The Foundations of Government Failure

9 . 4

public choice theory School of thought emphasizing that the government may not act to maximize the well-being of itscitizens.

government failure The inability or unwillingness of the government to act primarily in the interest of its citizens.

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9 . 4

bureaucracies Organizations of civil servants, such as the U.S. Department of Education or a town’s Department of Public Works, that are in charge ofcarrying out the services of government.

Size-Maximizing Bureaucracy

In the model of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat, the bureaucrat runs an agency that has a monopoly on the government provision of some good or service.

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9 . 4

Size-Maximizing Bureaucracy

The key question raised by this discussion is whether goods and services are provided more efficiently by the public or the private sector.

For the production of purely private goods and services, such as steel, telecommunications, or banking, it seems abundantly clear that private production is more efficient.

Correspondingly, a large literature finds that when state-owned companies are privatized, efficiency improves dramatically, and a smaller company is required to produce the same level of output.

Public vs. Public Provision

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9 . 4

Problems with Privatization

natural monopoly A market in which, because of the uniformly decreasing marginal cost of production, there is a cost advantage to have only one firm provide the good to all consumers in a market.

In economies of scale, the average cost of production falls as the quantity of the output increases.

contracting out An approach through which the government retains responsibility for providing a good or service, but hiresprivate sector firms to actually provide the good or service.

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9 . 4

The Implications of Government Failure

Do these failures have important implications?

Or can citizens use policies such as property tax limitations to limit harms imposed by government structure?

Some evidence suggests that government failures can have long-lasting negative impacts on economic growth.

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GOVERNMENT FAILURES AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

There are several recent studies that suggest that poor government structure can have long-lasting negative impacts on economic growth.

One such study is Mauro (1995), which used data collected by a private firm whose agents in various countries rated the quality of government along various dimensions such as the amount of red tape involved in government procedures and the amount of corruption.

The difficulty with studies such as Mauro’s, however, is that the nations with high-quality governments (the treatment group) may differ from those with low-quality governments (the control group) for other reasons as well, biasing the estimates of the effect of government quality.

E M P I R I C A L E V I D E N C E

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Conclusion9 . 5

The government is assumed to be a benign actor that serves only to implement the optimal policies to address externalities, to provide public goods and social insurance, and to develop equitable and efficient taxation. In reality, the government is a collection of individuals who have the difficult task of aggregating the preferences of a large set of citizens.

The core model of representative democracy suggests that governments are likely to pursue the policies preferred by the median voter, which in most cases should fairly represent the demands of society on average. Yet, while that model has strong evidence to support it, there is offsetting evidence that politicians have other things on their mind.

The extent to which government serves or fails to serve the interests of its citizens is a crucial one for future research in political economy.

Political Economy

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